Transparency Watch (TW): Your work on anti-corruption in the context of fighting drugs and crime at the UNODC must offer you a very unique perspective on the crossover of the two. Where does corruption end and crime begin? What is it that distinguishes the two?

Stuart Gilman (SG): When we talk about corruption, people assume that it is just a criminal act, when the truth is that before we even get to a crime there are a range of activities that fall into a grey area, that perhaps don’t warrant prosecution, but create an environment of corruption, and are in fact wrong. Take nepotism for example, hiring sons and daughters to fill posts in institutions. It is not illegal per se, but it is unethical and can be seen as corrupt. Another example involves accepting all sorts of lavish gifts while in office. In some countries, doing so may not be illegal, but such payments and gifts are certainly unethical.

Once matters get to the level of corrupt acts that are public, it is usually at the point of criminal law being violated. Then it is almost too late. I know the disease analogy is really overused, but it works so well. Corruption is like a cancer- it is much easier to prevent than it is to cure. Once it has spread so far that it is easily recognisable, it is hard to contain and cure.

This is why the entire second chapter of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) focuses on preventive measures, such as creating codes of conduct for public officials, to change the entire ethical environment.

TW: Corruption is often a big problem in failed states, where most institutions have very little capacity. When you are working in these kinds of situations, in which sectors of society can one most easily begin to address corruption?

SG: I don’t think it is possible to give one answer that would apply to all countries. Every failed state has vulnerabilities in terms of institutions, laws, capacity; but these may differ from one situation to the next. I believe it is necessary to do a nation-wide assessment in terms of vulnerability to find out whether it is the justice system or the police, or whether the country needs an independent anti-corruption agency or multiple agencies. This needs to be done on the ground. Of course, policy is necessary to support this, and we certainly use the UN Convention as a policy blueprint to guide our work, but each country does need to be uniquely evaluated and addressed with its cultural and political context in mind. Then you can see where to make the greatest impact.

TW: What are some challenges specific to fighting corruption in failed states, such as Afghanistan or Iraq?

SG: There has been no overall strategy in Afghanistan in terms of addressing corruption. The UNODC has of course been urging that the UNCAC be the blueprint for any national strategy. And ideally, that is what the Convention should be used for. But if you are carrying out a large multi-million dollar project on behalf of your government, the last thing you want to do is to go back to your home country and report to the government that the project has been misdirected or ineffective over the last three or four years and brought under the banner of the UN Convention. The country office won’t have the same control, the same visibility, but at least now the program will be coordinated. Given the nature of many development programmes this approach will not “ring well” in any capital.

One major challenge comes, surprisingly, from donors. Each donor program, each department, often seems to be working in isolation from any other. This is especially the case in Afghanistan, where a large reconstruction effort is underway, but it remains poorly coordinated because people are not looking to the UN Convention against Corruption as a way to coordinate anticorruption efforts. In many cases, donors seem to have invented their own technical assistance, whether it is working in the judiciary, or another sector, and suddenly they come up with an anti-corruption law that makes absolutely no sense. In the larger context in Afghanistan, one of those laws cost over a million dollars to create, and yet no one has looked at it in terms of the ability to implement it, much less whether it coordinates with the UNCAC, or efforts of other bilateral, multilateral organisations.

I am really concerned about the multiplicity of non-governmental organisations, and bilateral and multilateral donors. I don’t want to lay all the blame on donors, but the irony of it is that donors are not helping in the way they could because of the lack of coordination.

TW: What could be done to improve donor coordination?

SG: Everyone recognises the importance of coordination at the policy level. Donors have set up the Paris Pact. In addition, UNODC is, for example, the secretariat for the International Group for Anti-corruption Coordination (which includes more than 30 multilateral and bilateral organisations, and NGOs – including TI). The difficulty comes on the ground – everyone wants to maintain resources to keep control within a country. Although we have agreement on policy, we need to start looking at what that looks like in country in terms of actual impact — whether it is superficial and, let’s face it, often ineffective on the ground. Because corruption is the issue of the day, everyone wants to get in on it. The difficulty is that as more organisations, with their own agendas get involved, the less focused efforts actually become. Our hope is that the UNCAC can be a unifying blueprint for action.

TW: Taking the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, would you say that the situation in Afghanistan is different to that in Iraq due to the effects of the opium trade?

SG: In Afghanistan, there are of course issues of corruption surrounding the production and the distribution of drugs. A forthcoming UNODC report suggests that in those areas controlled by the Taliban, you are seeing a significant increase in the growth of poppies and production of illicit drugs. The result, of course ironically, is that prices have dropped and so there has been an increase in production in order to maintain the same profit levels. To work on the drug problem, you have to deal with the complexity of the Taliban who control much of the production. Additionally, the problem is compounded because many institutions of government have no effective anti-corruption controls, or are headed by the wrong kind of person, who if not personally corrupt, are ineffective.

It is actually drug distribution that is the problem when we are talking about corruption, and with distribution, you are actually looking at rather different sectors than those that are involved in the production. Again, it is important to do this assessment on the ground to begin targeting the different institutions involved. Is it the border guards, the tax authority, or perhaps the police authority that needs to be urgently addressed? For example, you need to ask whether the salaries of officials are reasonable given the circumstances in Afghanistan. You don’t want to get into a situation like Mexico 10 years ago, when border guards were accepting bribes for letting drugs pass over the border because their salaries were too low to support them and their families.

If you focus on the question of corruption in failed states you have to appreciate that there are different degrees. For example in Iraq, the ability to successfully undertake anti-corruption work is different than in other countries because the layers of ongoing violence, tied to political or sectarian causes, undermine these efforts. The situation in Haiti is different. Of course, it also is considered a failed state, but the challenge to combating corruption is not primarily the impact of violence.

TW: Corruption is an obvious problem in developing countries and failed states. What are the main issues UNODC is facing in the EU and North America?

SG: The UNODC has been working, especially when the Austrian government had the presidency of the EU, to engage the countries of “old Europe” in the anti-corruption debate. We are working together with INTERPOL and the Austrian government, to launch an Anti-corruption Academy in Laxenburg, Austria to carry out anti-corruption research and training. But our greatest concerns lie with a number of the countries in “new Europe”, specifically that they will go back on commitments they’ve made as a pre-requisite of EU membership. I am thinking of Slovenia, which has done away with its anti-corruption agency. Other new accession countries are considering doing the same. The notion that the conditionality, required for entering the EU, disappears once countries have been accepted –this habit of backsliding –is distressing. So this is something we are watching and hoping to address.

TW: What measurements do you use to judge if your anti-corruption efforts have been successful? How is the UNODC working to ensure that the UNCAC will be effective?

SG: UNODC is working on a more micro level than most organisations to ensure that effective technical assistance exists to deal with corruption issues. Specifically, we try to evaluate, for the country or specific agencies, the laws, institutions and measurable impact of anti-corruption policies. We try to avoid perception as much as possible, and focus on actual experience. The idea is not to make abstract recommendations for addressing corruption, but to first conduct a rigorous assessment so that we can have a benchmark against which to measure success. And then build on those benchmarks to find out what we have done right and what we might be doing wrong to see how we can make mid-course corrections to projects.

One example comes from our work on the judiciary in South Africa. We wanted to know before we began how people viewed the judicial system to assess where the problems were. So we asked questions such as: “Do you believe the judicial system is corrupt? Have you ever been asked for a bribe? Do you know of anybody that has? How many times was your case postponed? If your case was dismissed was that based on lack of evidence?” What we found in South Africa with regards to perceptions of the courts was that over 50 percent of people believed the courts were corrupt, but then if you asked, “were you ever asked for a bribe, or gift or gratuity?” less than one-tenth of one percent said “yes”. What is interesting is that the perception of corruption came from the fact that cases were postponed four, five, six times on average, or people had to travel one-and-a-half hours one way to get to a courtroom, or that cases were dismissed because of the way of categorising and storing evidence, so that the evidence would disappear. So what was defined as corruption was actually lack of efficient operation of the court system. And then you could begin adjusting and providing tools to prevent corruption, but also begin building efficiency, which are very different things. I believe an effective anti-corruption strategy must always do both.

Stuart Gilman is the head of The Global Programme against Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Unit and Rule of Law Section, Division for Operations United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.